Saturday, December 31, 2011

Competition is a good thing, and the browser arena has been a fierce arena for years now. There are at least four "major" browsers each vying for your attention, along with lots of smaller spin-offs (SRWare Iron or Flock, anyone?).

While the browser usage charts we share from time to time show overall browser usage amongst the Web at large, Download Squad readers are not exactly the average bunch in terms of browser use. So today we have one simple question for you:

Moshi Monsters are currently trying to take over the world, it seems. The site, aimed at kids around seven and upwards, now boasts over 50 million members, many of them paying a subscription fee to keep their own Moshi Monster happy and entertained. If you don’t pony up the fee, you’re only allowed to have [...]

Space-shooters are usually a fairly fiery affair, with many types of guns, weapon upgrades, power-ups and more. Dodge does away with all of that, while keeping the very essence of a space shooter: Dark background, fast action, and stuff blowing up all over the place.

Your vector-looking spacecraft is the fastest thing on the screen, most of the time. And as the header implies, you have absolutely no weapons; you can't get any, either. All you have is agility and maneuverability.

Your opponents shoot heat-seeking missiles at you; the missiles lock on and start tracking you. The trick is to dodge the missiles while putting them in the path of one of your enemies, thus letting them have a taste of their own medicine.

There are three types of enemies, at least in the first few levels: "simple" spaceships which fire slow projectiles, "tanks" which seem to be more serious and take more hits to destroy, and "circles." The circles simply explode, spewing twenty or thirty very fast projectiles. This sounds dangerous, but is actually great once you learn to use them; they are very destructive for tanks, and can even blow up other circles.

The soundtrack is very techno, but it meshes very well with this type of game. Intense fun!

If you're a baseball fanatic, the MLB At Bat app is a must-have. It's packed with live updates, scores, stats, news, and videos -- and right now there's another great reason to pick up At Bat. Pony up for At Bat and you'll get to enjoy MLB.tv free for the entire month of April.

The service streams games in HD to just about any connected device you can imagine, from iPhone to PS3, and even Roku boxes and LG Internet-ready televisions. The basic subscription will set you back $99 for the season, and a Premium sub is an extra $20 (and adds DVR functionality, multi-game PIP, and more).

MLB At Bat is available for Android and iOS and both apps run to $14.99 US.

So this professor comes up with a new toilet cleaner that works by "eating" the dirt; or so he thinks. That's how the plot starts for Tasty Planet. You play the role of the toilet cleaner, but you're not really a toilet cleaner after all -- you're a blob of gray goo that can eat anything that's smaller than yourself.

As you chomp away, you grow -- and as you grow, you can eat bigger and bigger stuff. The first level pits you against microscopic particles; by the time I stopped playing, I got all the way to eating cats and dogs. I know that sounds disturbing, but it's a really cute game, and there's no gore or anything like that.

Supposedly you keep growing and growing until you're able to eat whole planets (hence the name). The challenge factor comes when you realize you can't touch any critter larger than yourself - you'll get "bitten" and become smaller. In the beginning you're so small, that a single touch can kill you. Later on, you're big enough that touching larger animals doesn't kill you on the spot, but it does reduce your size. Each level is timed, so if you're not large enough by the time your clock runs out, you need to start again. As long as you don't touch the larger animals, you should be fine.

Sphero, from Orbotix, is what amounts to a remote-controlled cue ball. It is white, plastic, and fun, but unfortunately is also expensive. When I first saw Sphero announced I resigned myself to buying one, maybe two, regardless of the cost. Of course at the time I was expecting somewhere around $60, maybe $75. When the [...]

I really wanted to love Fruit Blast. If you’re not familiar with it, Fruit Blast is sort of a first-person shooter for your iPhone or iPod Touch. And it looks nice. The developers are Mark and Parker Lewis, a father and son team from California and avid BB gun enthusiasts, who wanted to create a [...]

The Dip Switch Click Watch from Watchismo has a bank of working dip switches that control various watch functions. The switches will toggle a bar graph metered time display, 12 hour and 24 hour digital time display, month, date, day of week and backlight. The watch has a stainless steel casing measuring 42mm x 35mm [...]

Rafael Rivera and Paul Thurrott have posted a second look at some of the early changes which have surface in Windows 8 milestone 3. First there was the restyled Welcome Screen, and now it appears that Microsoft is toying with bringing the Ribbon UI to Explorer.

The Ribbon, like in Microsoft Word and Excel, is context-aware, adding tabs for specific tasks which apply to the folder you're viewing -- such as library or picture management. You can also make out two new buttons in the status bar, which allow you to change the current folder's view style.

It's clear from all the placeholder images and repeated elements that this is very much a work in progress, but featuring the Ribbon more prominently in Windows 8 would certainly be a logical progression for Microsoft. It's slowly become more ubiquitous, moving beyond Office and into Wordpad, Paint, and several of the Windows Live Essentials applications.

There's more to the screenshots than the Ribbon UI, however. Our friend Long Zheng has noted two interesting elements in the images: Web sharing and sync (image after the break). That would likely mean users will be able to quickly upload files to SkyDrive and synchronize using Live Mesh right from Explorer in Windows 8. That's not a total surprise considering many of the earliest leaked images of Windows 8 showed Windows Live integration on the desktop.

Okay, I know what you're thinking: chocolate on Download Squad? That's right! That's because Chocomize is one of the nerdiest ways to get chocolate online: it's a website where you customize your own bar using a multi-step process.

We've covered Chocomize before in our holiday gift guide, so when they reached out to us offering to do a giveaway, we really couldn't resist.

Chocomize is giving away ten gift certificates, each worth $50, for you to create your own customized chocolate. They sent us some pictures of their recent creations, which you can find in the gallery below.

Regardless of the giveaway, you can use the discount code switched to get 10% off any Chocomize order. The code is valid through April 20th - just in time for Easter!

One click; just one single well-aimed click. That's all you get in Boomshine.

That single click triggers a chain reaction; circles start exploding, and other circles colliding with the shockwaves explode as well, creating their own shockwaves, which then catch other circles.

It's been done before, yes, but this one is a great iteration. The soundtrack is mellow, with lots of piano and some nice percussion (not electronic - it sounds like drums).

At each level you need to make a certain number of circles explode to go on to the next level. I got up to level 12, where you get 60 circles and need to make 55 of them explode. And then I kept trying and trying, but simply couldn't get it. I did get to 54 circles a couple of times, but as they say, you don't get points for trying.

There's no time limit, so you can carefully study the pattern of motion and place your click at the exact right place to create the best chain reaction. I've found that clicking near the middle of the screen works quite well, especially if the balls are slowly moving in that direction. By the time the first shockwave dies off, the oncoming balls usually hit it and the chain reaction continues.

1974: The Altair 8800 microcomputer goes on sale. It doesn't offer much, but it's the small start of a big trend toward small things. At its heart was the Intel 8080 microprocessor, with the remarkable capacity of 8 bits, or 1 byte. The kit offered a 256-byte memory, just about enough to contain one sentence of text.

But alas, not all apps are created equal; some are way, way better than others. Which leads me to today's Ask DLS question: What is your favorite mobile app at the moment?

We don't necessarily mean the latest craze; we'd like to hear about apps that have stood the test of time on your device, apps that are among the first you install on a new smartphones, apps that have earned their place on your home screen and in your heart.

So, what are some of these apps? Bonus points for links to screenshots in the comments!

Lyle just wants to take his family out on a camping trip. They need some time together as a family, “away from the busyness and distractions,” despite his teenage son’s objections. When their boat gets caught in an unexpected storm, they wind up on a strange island inhabited by some weird creatures. It doesn’t take [...]

Amazon's recently-introduced Cloud Drive is a great place to store your files online. It offers 5 gigs of totally free space, and U.S. users also get access to the handy Cloud Player app (for Web and Android!) which streams music you upload to your Cloud Drive.

The service could be a little easier to use, however. Until Amazon releases a desktop client, Windows users might want to take another look at Gladinet. The multi-service cloud connector has now added Amazon Cloud Drive support and will let you map a network drive letter to your account with minimal fuss.

Once you've added your credentials to Gladinet, just pick the letter you want to assign to the drive and you're good to go. You can then copy files to and from your Cloud Drive, rename items, and manage folders like you would any local hard drive in your system.

The only downside is that the free version of Gladinet gives you a limited number of cloud interactions. Once you use those up, you'll need to upgrade to the paid version, which costs $49.99. If you work with a number of cloud-based storage providers, however, it could be well worth the price tag.

Ricardo Cerqueira, a member of the CM team and LG Android device guru, has added official CyanogenMod nightly (CM7 for the time being) support for three new LG devices -- The LG Optimus 3D, the LG Optimus Pro, and the LG Optimus Hub -- and has once again made support for the LG Optimus Black official after a short hiatus. Here in the states we're not too familiar with these devices, but we have plenty of American counterparts that are relatively close, so this may make things much easier to support our LG devices as well. Quality hardware and specs, meet quality software. It's sounds like a hell of a match.

We've all heard it before; you need to select a lengthy password, one that's hard to guess. Not a dictionary word. And it has to have some capital letters in it too, and some digits, and a symbol or two won't hurt either.

It's basically like a full-screen version of one of those password-strength meters websites sometimes use. But instead of showing you a bar going from "weak" to "strong", it shows you an estimation of how long your password would take to crack. That's a much more visceral way to understand why your password is strong.

For example, when I entered "rabbit", it came back with "your password is one of the 500 most common passwords. It could be cracked almost instantly". "rabbit5" would take two hours, "$rabbit5" would take 38 days, and "$rabbitZ5" would take 237 years. It's quite enlightening to see what a difference three simple characters can make.

Despite positive first impressions and a strong sales debut, Sony’s latest handheld sold terribly last week. According to Japanese console sales figures published by market research company Media Create, 72,479 PlayStation Vita units were sold in the week ending on December 25th. Though that may seem like a respectable figure, remember that the PlayStation Vita hit Japanese store shelves on December 17th, selling over 320,000 units in just over two days.

That means the PlayStation Vita has suffered nearly a 78 percent drop in sales over the first two weeks; even the Nintendo 3DS sold better in Japan during it’s first two weeks, despite suffering a similar drop in sales (from roughly 370,000 the first week to 210,000 the next). Of course the steep drop in demand for the 3DS notoriously spurred Nintendo to slash the price from $250 to $170 back in July, and sales of the 3D gaming handheld have been strong ever since. In fact Media Create reports that over 480,000 Nintendo 3DS units were sold in Japan last week, and you have to wonder if Sony will take similar measures to convince consumers that a portable gaming system is worth $250.

And as long as you’re pondering, ponder this: is any dedicated portable gaming system worth paying for when smartphones have become ubiquitous? If a compact, portable gaming system like the PlayStation Vita can’t succeed commercially in a country where long commutes and crowded homes are common, it leaves little hope that the Vita will be able to compete with smartphones when it launches in North America next year. Given the long lines and network issues that accompanied the Japanese launch of the iPhone 4S, perhaps it’s no surprise that the PlayStation Vita is failing to meet Sony’s sales predictions in that region; it’s hard to justify spending $250 for a gaming device that’s bulkier than your iPhone and offers inferior battery life to boot.

Last week Sony executive Andrew House claimed the PlayStation Vita was designed for hardcore gamers and thus had an advantage over both smartphones and the Nintendo 3DS because of a strong suite of games and social networking features that would “give people a sense of value for their money”, but the steep drop in sales suggests that most gamers are satisfied with the devices they already own. There’s still plenty of time for Sony to turn things around by slashing prices or announcing new games, but it’s still hard to stomach the notion of paying up to $50 for a PlayStation Vita game when iPhone owners can download a puzzle game like Cut The Rope for $1.

Conversation at the dinner table often becomes too technical for me. My husband and four kids are very math and science-minded, with lots of hands-on experience turning their ideas into something useful. Many of those discussions turn into real ways to make our small farm operate more efficiently. They’ve created parts that no longer exist [...]

It's a natural progression for TweetDeck, especially since its originally Adobe Air app is practically all Web code. TweetDeck Web will sport a feature set which is nearly identical to the Chrome app, with the notable exception of Twitter streaming.

Initially, TweetDeck is targeting Firefox 4 and 3.6, Google Chrome, and Safari. Opera and Internet Explorer 9 won't be invited to the dance until a bit later on.

If you'd like to get in on the TweetDeck Web beta, head on over and register -- or sign up using your existing TweetDeck account.

For what seems like an eternity, Download Squad readers have reacted to news of security exploits targeting Adobe Reader with a common sentiment: why doesn't Microsoft build its own secure PDF reader into Windows? Apparently the Windows 8 team agrees, and they're working away at an application called Modern Reader which is exactly that.

From the handful of screenshots Paul Thurrott has shared, it's clear that Modern Reader has been built with Metro in mind. You can see the Reader back button in the top-left corner of the yellow image and the minimal page navigation bar on the right. We've posted some larger images we managed to scrape from Google's cache after the break.

Thurrott also mentions that Modern Reader is the first program spotted which is built using AppX -- a packaging technology that may allow developers to roll a single build to both Windows 8 desktops and Windows Phone 8 mobile devices.

While we've still yet to see anything truly Earth-shattering, the tandem of Rafael Rivera and Paul Thurrott continues to churn out insight about interesting new features they've discovered in Windows 8 milestone 3. The latest discovery is that Aero in Windows 8 will be able to automatically adapt itself to match your current wallpaper image. It's a bit like what Windows 7 already does with your taskbar icons: if a program alert needs your attention, the icon will glow using the predominant color (e.g. Firefox should glow orange).

And yes, you can already make Windows 7 behave this way if you like. Over at CodePlex, there's a little program called Aura that parks itself in your system tray and automatically adjusts your window borders to compliment your wallpaper images. The effect is quite nice, and you can try it out by minimizing your windows and cycling through your theme's wallpapers (right click on your desktop and choose next desktop background).

First, let's get the obvious out of the way: In 2012, cameras will become smaller, more powerful, and more specialized. Meanwhile, smartphone cameras will continue to improve at a blistering pace, approaching the imaging capabilities and features found in stand-alone cameras of a few years ago. Over the next 12 months, you can expect another great round of "phones versus cameras."

In some ways, stand-alone cameras and phones will forge a more symbiotic relationship in 2012. In 2011, we saw both storage cards (the Eye-Fi Mobile X2) and point-and-shoot cameras (the Panasonic Lumix FX90) that synced wirelessly to smartphones and tablets, thus enabling iOS and Android devices to store and share images from higher-quality cameras over ad-hoc Wi-Fi connections.

That trend of cameras "playing nice" with phones is likely to continue in 2012, but you should also expect cameras to come out fighting against their smartphone counterparts. You'll almost certainly see some very competitively priced cameras with high-end optics and features that run circles around those found in your average smartphone. Their arrival will make buying a "real" camera a more attractive proposition.

We'll know more specifics in just a few weeks when the International CES 2012 trade show is in full swing, but here are some safe bets for the upcoming year.

You'll See CMOS, Mostly

T-Mobile MyTouch 4G SlideFrom DSLRs to smartphones, you'll be hard-pressed to find a new camera in 2012 that has a CCD sensor. While the type of sensor embedded in your camera of choice may not be of much interest to you, the in-camera features associated with CMOS sensors certainly might be: Among them are 1080p video capture at high frame rates, very fast burst modes, good low-light performance, automated HDR image capture, 3D shooting with a single lens, the ability to simulate a shallow depth of field with a small sensor, and video recording at hundreds of frames per second to enable superslow-motion playback.

The CMOS sensor's speed and versatility have led to many of the best features we've seen in stand-alone cameras in recent years--and that wave of in-camera innovation will hit the world of smartphone cameras in 2012. In fact, we've already seen the first ripples in the past few months: T-Mobile's MyTouch 4G Slide and the HTC Amaze both offer photographic features that we were used to encountering only in stand-alone cameras, such as motion-controlled panorama modes, multiexposure HDR, and burst modes that reach up to 5 frames per second.

Of course, the CMOS sensor is only part of the equation. A camera's image-processing engine has to do a lot of the work. And that brings me to my next point...

Quad-Core Phones Will Have Great Camera Features

As Ginny Mies explains in her 2012 smartphone preview, the mobile world will be all about quad-core phones and tablets in the next 12 months or so.

Using that extra processing horsepower--and possibly even dedicated cores for image processing--smartphone cameras are likely to shrink the performance gap between themselves and stand-alone cameras even more in the coming year.

LG Optimus smartphone with quad-core chipA quad-core phone's processing power will enable features such as faster burst-shooting modes, improved noise reduction, very fast image stitching and stacking for panorama and HDR modes, lightning-quick autofocus, automatic scene recognition, and built-in effects filters that you can apply to video and images as you're shooting them.

With all that additional imaging firepower in smartphones, plus their ability to share everything wirelessly on the go, what can stand-alone cameras do to establish a competitive edge over phones? Funny you should ask.

Long Zooms, Wide Apertures, Manual Controls, and Rugged Frames

ENikon Coolpix P300ven as phone cameras improve dramatically, certain aspects of a stand-alone camera's optics, controls, and hardware will be superior for the foreseeable future. Look for the major camera manufacturers to focus on what smartphone cameras can't do, and then to attack those shortcomings with reckless abandon.

For example, pocket megazoom cameras are becoming truly pocketable, which seems impossible given their optical-zoom ranges. We've seen compact cameras that are less than an inch thick yet offer optical-zoom ranges up to 12X; expect body sizes to shrink and zoom ranges to grow in the next year.

Another type of camera that wields serious imaging advantages over your average smartphone is the "premium" or "advanced" point-and-shoot. These pocketable cameras offer bright, wide-aperture lenses--often F2.0 or F1.8 at the wide-angle end of the zoom--in addition to manual exposure controls.

Compared with most camera phones, these models are capable of excellent image quality in low light and with shallow depth-of-field effects, both due to the maximum aperture settings. In past years, these higher-end pocket cameras have been priced around $400 to $500; in the next year, we may see more of them following the pricing strategy of the $300-range Nikon Coolpix P300.

And because you probably don't want to risk damaging the center of your mobile-computing universe by using it to take underwater or skydiving shots, ruggedized cameras will always have a competitive edge in the "phones versus cameras" discussion. All the major camera manufacturers continue to release waterproof, drop-proof, snowproof, and dustproof cameras--some of which will look more like everyday models than weatherproofed niche devices.

TripAdvisor, the popular travel planning tool, has just launched an app for Windows Phone 7. Just like the mobile website, the app allows you to search for anything travel-related -- from hotels and flights to restaurants and points-of-interest to visit once you reach your destination.

Geolocation is supported, which allows TripAdvisor to quickly locate places nearby. But while that's a neat feature, it's also a bit of a downer -- because, really, it's about the only feature TripAdvisor for WP7 brings to the table that its mobile Web app doesn't already offer (its browser-based geolocation doesn't work with WP7 at the moment).

While it's nice to see Windows Phone 7 users getting some big-name apps, it'd be even nicer if we saw some packing a bit more swagger.

Still, TripAdvisor for WP7 might just be worth installing on your device if you're frequently on the go -- at least until a better browser arrives with the Mango update.

The FCC, who has surprisingly been all up in every carriers business as of late has now spoken about Verizon's $2 convenience fee that will go into effect as of January 15th.

“On behalf of American consumers, we’re concerned about Verizon’s actions and are looking into the matter,”

What, exactly that means in anyone's guess -- but given other carriers have been charging such things for years now, we'll just have to wait and see what they have to say about Verizon now starting it up. In the meantime, enjoy this soundbite.

While not a game per se, I found Mitoza intriguing enough to spend quite some time with it. You start off with a seed, and are then presented with two choices: you can either click a flower pot, or click a cute little birdie.

If you click the flower pot, a flower pot appears and the seed is planted inside. You're then presented with two further choices -- a water can or a bottle of fertilizer. Each choice you make causes your creation to morph, and presents you with two other choices.

There's no winning or losing, really. Each "game" usually lasts around four or five choices, at which point the plant/animal dies in some creative (but not too gruesome) way. At this point you instantly start over with a new seed.

The graphics are captivating; the whole thing has a cinematic feel to it, with a bit of artificial camera shake added for style.

All in all, it's a fun, peaceful way to spend a few minutes, and it might even make you think a little bit while you're at it.

It sure is nice to see some new developer action over at Flickr. The relatively slow-moving photo-sharing service has just announced a new sharing update, which consists of several new and easy ways to embed or link to your photos:

Share from Photo page: There's a new sharing option on each and every photo page. When logged off, the button shows only Facebook and Twitter options. But once you log on, you get Tumblr and Blogger too, and can configure other sharing venues as well.

Share non-public content on Facebook: This doesn't sound like a great idea, but you now can share private photos on Facebook if you're so inclined (and if you trust your privacy settings).

That's the gist of the update; it makes it easier to show off your pretty pictures in a plethora of places.

In most games, dying is a bad thing. You have to start all over again, or at least revert to the last save point and lose some progress. Not so in Survival Lab: in this pixelated gem you play as a lone individual pitted against ruthless weapons in a sealed chamber. You have to run, jump and duck, collecting little yellow things (I have no idea what they're called).

For each donut-like yellow thing you pick up, you gain a bit of experience. If you manage to collect several in a row without getting hit, this counts as a combo. You can see my mad combo skills in the screenshot, of course. Collecting combos is a good thing, because a ten-point combo gives you for more experience than just collecting ten dounts one by one (getting hit in-between).

Having experience is useful, because once you die, you get to a screen where you can upgrade your skills. You can learn to run faster, double-jump (and then double-jump higher), and duck. You can also gain more armour so that getting hit won't kill you so quickly.

What makes this simple game so addictive is that when you die, your experience doesn't reset. You just go back to the same level, or another level of your choosing, and keep accumulating more and more experience. Lots of fun, especially if you're into the whole retro-gaming thing.

This post brought to you by Snapdragon by Qualcomm. All opinions are 100% mine. Have you heard the news? Since December 18, Qualcomm Stadium, home of the San Diego Chargers, has changed their name to Snapdragon Stadium. Since 1997, Qualcomm, the San Diego-based wireless chip giant, has had naming rights to the Charger’s stadium. This [...]

Along with the faster 6-week release cadence, Firefox's new Chrome-like release channels have also been given names and anticipated update frequencies. The most notable change is the introduction of a new alpha channel -- which is analogous to Chrome Canary -- that will be called 'aurora' and will update nightly. Aurora will be where fixes and features are tested, and either approved for Beta, or backed out to Central. Aurora will have a new icon, too.

The Nightly (mozilla-central) channel will remain unchanged in name and frequency, but it will gain a new 'nightly icon.' The Beta (mozilla-beta) channel will remain as-is, with new builds rolling out weekly. The Release (mozilla-release) channel will also remain as-is, with security and stability updates coming every 6 to 12 weeks.

It should be noted that the names (including 'aurora') are not necessarily final, but it's unlikely that they'll change. We're also awaiting the arrival of the new 'channel switching' technology, which should arrive in the next few days -- in time for the release of Firefox 6 aurora!